Monday, May 11, 2015

A Game of Norway

On May 17th Norway celebrates its Constitution Day. This national holiday celebrates the signing of the Constitution of Norway at Eidsvoll on May 17th 1814. The constitution declared Norway to be an independent kingdom in an attempt to avoid being ceded to Sweden after Denmark–Norway's devastating defeat in the Napoleonic Wars.

Last year, to mark the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Norwegian constitution, Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang released a story map to help tell the history behind the signing of the constitution. A Game of Norway is a beautifully designed story map exploring and explaining the historical events which eventually led to the signing of the Norwegian Constitution on May 17th 1814.

The map data for A Game of Norway was obtained from Natural Earth, who provide open source vector and raster map data at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. The map data was then styled using QGIS.

The map animations and narrative elements are made possible by using skrollr, a parallax scrolling JavaScript library. Skrollr allows you to animate any CSS property of any element based on the horizontal scrollbar position. Using skrollr A Game of Norway is able to move around the background map image and animate the movements of the ships, troops and other images on the map as the user scrolls down the page.